B tch
by tami3
Summary: Sam lives up to his nickname.


Bitch

If you wanted to talk about it with a beginning, you had some options.

Sam got his nickname when he was seven and couldn't finish his Chicken McNuggets but wouldn't let Dean have the rest. Lashed down with a seatbelt, mouth greasy and crumby, he'd wriggled away from Dean's grabbing hands to roll down a window and chuck them into the sawgrass and gator trenches lining the I-95. Dean had punched him in the arm and called him the choice insult of his favorite movie heroes.

Their dad had kept one hand on the wheel and reached around the front seat to smack Dean on the side of his buzzcut.

It was John who made the trips to Blockbuster and rented tapes for the boys to watch in the motel rooms. Closest he ever came to bothering with babysitters. But without his wife he didn't know or care what the parent advisory rating was. He just let Dean pick. So Sam had known that one since he was five and had even got Dean back with the c-word before. He just had more sense than Dean about doing it in front of their father.

So Sam only whined a PG "Jerk!" back and got a Flintstone sherbet pop at the next gas station to make up for his big brother being mean to him.

Bitch, Dean had thought with every fiber of his being as his dad made him fill up the tank. Sammy had sat on the hood in a purple windbreaker, smugly shoving neon orange ice cream down his hole.

But Sam had just been a kid. Sam might have really started deserving it when he turned thirteen and flipped the taps on the teen angst. Suddenly it was like there was nothing his spoiled princess butt didn't find fault with.

Wait, nah, that wasn't technically true. Sam wasn't that simple. It was more like, he knew that it was too late to start complaining about not having a normal life. He had to settle for things that "crossed the line". Like, okay, maybe he'd hunt on a school night. But if Dean or his dad pointed out that there was a big nasty offing people on a day that just happened to be before a test, he'd have fits playing tragic victim. Dean perfected his lock-picking skills digging Sam and his books out of dozens of different motel bathrooms.

So it wasn't that Sam started thinking in earnest that a real older brother wouldn't leave his third biggest hunting knife in his kid brother's backpack. It was just that before, he wouldn't have given Dean the silent treatment for a whole day for not picking him up from the principal's office. It used to be that legitimate excuses about having to follow a lead on the Bunny Man was enough to get Dean off. Not anymore.

Sam's moodswings were especially irritating to Dean coming in at the same time as his fugly pimpled puss. That was something that Dean just didn't "get" in any sense of the word. At Sammy's age he had already been milking soppy smiles from suburban wives in the supermarkets. They didn't even blink or call the manager when he slipped Twinkies underneath his jacket.

He and Sam hadn't always gotten on well then, while Sam was growing out of his ugly (a subject that Dean never bothered to be careful around) and Dean was growing into whatever you called finding out that he could get bar girls to take him into the backroom and hike up their skirts with nothing more than a wink and a line.

So yeah, maybe it had started then, with evicted-from-bathroom-Sam sulking in the backseat with a textbook and a flashlight, refusing to move no matter how much their dad yelled. Dean would make himself useful by hauling Sam out by his scrawny ankle. Sam didn't take it lying down and it got harder on both of them as Sam's height kept creeping up closer to his brother's, one freakish inch at a time.

But at fifteen he pulled even with Dean at 6'0, got the number of red spots on his face down to one or two at a time, and asked him to teach him how to drive without too much extra lip. Which would have been fine, only then he promptly refused to do anything Dean said.

So, it might have been then, with Sam holding the wheel in a white-knuckled deathgrip. On a stretch of open Arizona road with no permit, no cops, just Sam sweating through a faded A–team t-shirt Dean used to wear and a pair of dorky sandals. They were shut up in some rusty gray Oldsmobile with maroon upholstery and no AC. Their dad had picked up the piece of junk with a wad of paper money and it would be gone less than a year later. Dean had swiped the keys from the nightstand because there was no way Sam's learner was going to be his car. Dean had only gotten the Impala when their dad turned it over in time for Dean's twentieth birthday.

When Sam swore at finding himself accidently in reverse (again), Dean had been there for it, riding shotgun. He'd held a dewey blue Gatorade in his fist that left his tongue colored bright and salty sweet, and pulled his sticky bare shoulders off from the back of the seat.

It was just after Dean had Nair'ed Sam's shampoo bottle, so Sam's hair was shorter than it'd ever been in his life. The fine hairs on the back of his neck glowed white in the desert sunlight as his he kept looking down at his feet at the pedals no matter how many times Dean told him not to. The tenth time telling him shit Sammy, ease up some on the goddamned brakes—Sam scowling a tough little cuss scowl, stubbornly getting his foot back on the accelerator and making the saguaros jerkily fly past—somehow, Dean thought his little brother might just turn out all right.

But then it all really started with Sam running away for the first time. He was sixteen and it had been the first day of spring

He took the fucking Impala.

Dean was climbing the walls by the time Sam finally slid his skinny teenaged ass back into the motel room. If it had been for the usual offenses—badmouthing their dad, stealing Dean's last beer from the mini-fridge, "accidentally" throwing out the numbered napkin the D-cup waitress slipped into Dean's second order of fries—Dean might have let it go like he sometimes did.

But going missing for two fucking weeks—taking off without a word, without a note, and with Dean's baby—Sam sure as hell knew what was coming because he was quick to toss his backpack onto one of the beds so Dean would have an easier time pinning him to the wall.

They had been in Baker, Nevada. Population 2,051 and one less poltergeist as of last week after the boy's father the temp-custodian had stuffed herb bags into the corners of the local historic schoolhouse. Before Sam had taken off, John had moved on to a case about a ghost that was violent towards young women wandering the Ironwood forests. He'd left his sons behind to make sure there were no new reports of levitating children colliding into airborne desks.

Fine with Dean, what with the pretty brunette teacher's assistant making suggestive glances at the cloakroom in between comments on how happy the kids were. Dean had tossed the keys to Sam and told him to wait in the car. With Sam rolling his eyes and jogging out, things had been just fine. It didn't stay that way, not with Dean getting back to the parking lot and finding both Sam and the Impala gone.

Dean got the nightmare started by fielding a call from their father, explaining how he had such a debilitating case of indigestion or stomach flu that he didn't think that he could move for a few days. Sam? Oh, Sammy was being an angel, making the runs to the drug store and the diners for his big bro. Couldn't do without him.

Dean couldn't believe his luck when his dad didn't ask for Sam to call back to clear up that piss-poor excuse for thinking quick on his feet. His dad fixed his notion of that when the man rolled back into town two days later behind the wheel of the Impala. It had been abandoned on a lonely shoulder of road with numbers to call taped up on the windshield.

Dean had been backhanded right there in the motel parking lot.

There had been some words about failure, and thinking twice if he thought he was going to get the car back after losing his goddamned _brother_—Dean shouting back that he'd been trying, looking everywhere on foot for the past three days—John saying, "Dammit Dean, how many people do you think this family can afford to lose? Your mother's gone, you better not have cost us Sam too," and then he and the car were gone in a huff of exhaust and dust, off to look for Sam_._

Dean had spent the first half of March 24th alone and doing nothing but just being sorry, so goddamned sorry and praying to whatever, what he didn't know.

It didn't matter if he didn't have a God, he just had to tell something or someone please, please just let Sam come back. Because it really wouldn't be all that hard for Sam to take off forever. Dean had even convinced their father just a month ago to have a license made for him so they'd have extra driver on hand. With Sam's freaky height and sour face making him look so much older, no one would even think to slow him down long enough for Dean to catch up to him.

Sam was smart, hard, and had been getting himself up to kill that spook in the closet instead of crying out for mommy and daddy for years now. Sam didn't need shelter, he didn't need care. He was one tough little mother who could swing a iron crowbar better than his dad or his brother, so Dean knew that whatever was out there in the "normal world," it couldn't hurt Sam. Not really. He just didn't know what to do about it because it wasn't a bad thing that Sam could take care of himself. It was just.

Dean hadn't been expecting it to take his brother away.

When Sam had finally come back, Dean had wanted to think that it was because he remembered what day it was. But Sam had only slunk in smelling like old pizza and unwashed dog, and that was about the most endearing thing about him. He took the shouting, the beating, the hugging, and the second beating with infuriating cool, keeping his head down and arms limp at his sides the entire time. When he tossed out a sorry, he did it fast like couldn't stand carrying it anymore, and refused to give it another try when Dean didn't let it take and went right on yelling.

But when Dean had to take a break to bring his hands up quick to his eyes before it got any worse, Sam broke character just for a second. He inched up to his brother, slow and wary. When he got close enough, he carefully rested Dean's head onto his own shoulder. With his arms on Dean's back, Sam had rocked him once, twice, like an overgrown baby. Sam had felt sticky and gross and he must have forgotten to pack deodorant before his little adventure, but it was the first time he'd ever been able to do that.

And hell, something in Dean just gave up.

Dean's other half of his twenty-first birthday went better, with him walking Sam to a strip mall for chicken and beer and telling Sam he could have as many as he wanted. Sam was a smart kid and stopped at three pieces and three cans. Ergo, he didn't have a hangover to keep company with the shitstorm that was their father coming in the next morning after they'd forgotten to call him the night before. As for Dean, he sat next to his brother thinking that at least he looked and acted as if he had that stomach thing he'd lied to their dad about.

They pulled out less than an hour later, John grim in the driver's seat and both of his boys in the doghouse in the backseat. Sam had kept his ear tipped to the opposite window, his brown hair curling against cheeks pink with heat. Sitting next to Dean with a slight smile and in the middle of a spell of clear skin, he'd looked a shade more angelic than he usually did. One more time, Dean wondered if there was hope after all.

Then Sam shoved his huge smelly feet onto Dean's lap and Dean knew there was none at all.

A/N:

Rewrote this three times during the process of marathoning Supernatural. Goddamn you writers squeezing out more childhood angsty canon so late in the game.


End file.
